Celebrating 21 years as a professional writer and in practice, I (Self care coach, supervisor and trauma therapist, Eve Menezes Cunningham) share 21 lessons I’ve learned in hopes of saving you years or even decades in your own trauma and ADHD recovery journey.
From my early days discovering “you’re not broken” to advanced insights about nervous system regulation and embodied healing, I reveal what really works (and what doesn’t), why your body’s wisdom trumps any technique, how trauma healing can be gentle, and why following your life force is the ultimate GPS.
These aren’t just textbook theories. Whether you’re a practitioner, on your own healing journey, or simply curious about what actually creates lasting change, this anniversary episode offers ideas to help you transform how you approach your own self-care, wellbeing and personal growth. And, if you have one, your own practice.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
It might be joy, it might be gratitude, it might be anger, it might be pain, it might be sadness, it might be jangly anxiety, it could be anything at all, but the more you get into the habit of connecting with your life force, connecting with your energy, connecting with your charge, connecting with your prana, your chi, it makes everything much easier.
You don’t need all the theory, you don’t need all the tools, all you need to do is connect with yourself and ask yourself, what do I need? What will help me right now? What am I feeling? What is that an indication of?
And it becomes a beautiful, exciting language, learning your own body, learning your own energy.
Hi, you’re listening to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast and I’m your host, Eve Menezes Cunningham.
To find out more about the podcast, access free resources, find out different ways in which we might work together, events coming up, the book, full show notes for each of the episodes, including transcripts and links, you can go to thefeelbettereverydaypodcast.com or selfcarecoaching.net and let me know if you’ve got any questions.
There’s a lot there, but I hope that all the resources are easily accessible for you. Whether or not you get in touch with me there’s loads and loads you can do yourself. And with that in mind, I want to start today’s episode, which is celebrating my 21st business birthday today.
And essentially, you don’t need me or anyone else to remember how to trust yourself. That being said, I can help. I love doing these podcast episodes. I love sharing through my writing, through all the different ways in which I work, sharing some of the things that have helped me as well as many of the things that I work with in my private practice and with groups. Because we have access to a world of resources and ancient wisdom being proved by modern neuroscience.
We have so much available to us. And I thought with that in mind, I would share 21 of my lessons and blessings from 21 years in business. I hope it helps you, but I also never want you to forget that you already have everything you need within you.
You don’t need me. You don’t need anyone else. And what we listen to, what we watch, what we pay attention to, it helps us. It can, where we put our attention has quite a big impact. So I am hoping that my work does help you, even if we’ve never met or I’ve never heard from you.
1) I want to start with number one, which is something I wish I’d known when I was starting out. I had a suspicion and everything I initially trained with was to save my own life. But the fact that you’re not broken, no matter how much your trauma history or your ADHD brain tries to convince you otherwise, you are not broken. You are worthy. You are lovable. You’re not too much and you are enough and you deserve all the goodness life has to offer. So if you stop listening now, I hope you remember that.
2) I’ve made a note of Cheryl Richardson, who was, she still is one of my favourite authors. She was booed on Oprah decades ago for having the temerity to suggest that the audience should be taking care of themselves. She kind of popularised the idea of self-care and yeah, she was booed by lots of mums who had been conditioned to say, No. Now, everyone talks about the oxygen mask and on an aeroplane, you sort yours first, you make sure you’re OK. You can breathe before you look after any dependents. Great.
Of course, everyone wants to make sure that other people are safe as well. But I want you to also consider the fact that you, even if you don’t have dependents, even if you’re just getting your oxygen mask for yourself, you are worthy. I love Cheryl Richardson’s approach and she was an enormous inspiration to me early on.
I wouldn’t have believed that I’d still be doing this and I’d be loving it even more 21 years later. But I just had a bit of a flicker of the light behind. So yeah, easily distracted ADHD brain.
She is such a gentle presence. Her books are so lovely. And I think for me, even though she was on Oprah, and obviously I was starting out as a coach and complimentary therapist back in 2004, it was her gentle approach. I didn’t have the words for it then, therapeutic coaching. And I trained as a coach before I trained as a therapist. So I wasn’t doing that yet.
It became what I call self-care coaching. Where I integrate all my offerings, including the yoga, the NLP, the EFT, all of it. But back then she was the only one who… I thought I knew that my coaching was working. I knew it was helping me. I knew it was helping my clients. But when you’d see coaches in the public eye back then, they tended to be very Tony Robbins, who I also love, but very much not my vibe. So yeah, I just wanted to name her as an enormous lesson and blessing.
And also Martha Beck, who I later got to interview, which remains one of my favourite interviews, but just their gentleness and their wisdom. And I’m not suggesting that the more dynamic coaches weren’t like that. But I think Martha Beck also was my introduction into working with the body long before I actually started working with the body, because…
This is Mighty Meadbh. I don’t know if she’s going to say Hello.
I remember her having me and other people in the group identify a really simple, basic way, I’ll go into it with the Sole to Soul Circle. To just listen to the body’s wisdom, which is always there. This was before I trained as a yoga therapist, before I did any of the somatic work that I do, but it was a real revelation.
So definitely there.
3) And that’s what I’m saying, really, when I say number three, you know yourself best, you can trust yourself, you may well have, especially with trauma, especially with ADHD, have been conditioned into believing that you need outside information and outside dictators, like kind of didactic, telling you what to do, how to do everything. Learning how other people have done it can be really helpful, checklists, body doubling, all sorts of things, all of this can be really helpful.
But you don’t need it, you know yourself, you know what feels good, you know what doesn’t. And the more I’ve learned, and the more… can you hear her purr?
The more I understand about the nervous system and Polyvagal Theory and how we’re wired to thrive when we feel safe, welcome and loved. And with trauma, with ADHD, you may well have been conditioned out of it, but it’s never too late to relearn, to notice what feels good, move towards that, what doesn’t, move away from that.
4) Feel Better Every Day. I liked the name because it had my name in it, Eve, and it just felt positive.
But I was always careful to avoid toxic positivity, encouraging people to welcome the full emotional landscape. And recognising it’s a bit like when you go to the gym, or if you’re doing anything fitness-related. As we build muscle, we’re breaking muscle down. With personal development work, with trauma recovery, with the Self Care Coaching, with befriending your ADHD brain, a lot of the time you’ll feel better after watching a video, or listening to a podcast, or doing one of the exercises I shared, or for people who work with me one-to-one or in groups. But it’s not always the case. Healing isn’t linear.
It’s not like Woohoo! But I think for me, even knowing that I was learning things that were helping me enjoy life and want to be alive, Feel Better Every Day just felt like a lovely name.
5) Following your life force, your charge, your prana, your chi. Again, it’s so body-based, and it’s energy-based, and it’s recognising, in any given moment, where you feel most alive. And it might be joy, it might be gratitude, it might be anger, it might be pain, it might be sadness, it might be jangly anxiety. It could be anything at all.
But the more you get into the habit of connecting with your life force, connecting with your energy, connecting with your charge, connecting with your prana, your chi, it makes everything much easier.
You don’t need all the theory. You don’t need all the tools. All you need to do is connect with yourself and ask yourself, what do I need? What will help me right now? What am I feeling? What is that an indication of? And it becomes a beautiful, exciting language, learning your own body, learning your own energy.
6) The embodiment, the embodied wellbeing element. And I think it was a huge lesson and blessing to learn that it was safe for me to be in my body. Like I say, all the things I trained in initially, they were to help me.
Start however small you need. There’s a lovely exercise around it. You might start with an earlobe, you might start with the tip of your nose, you might start with one toe. Any part of the body that feels neutral and that you can expand on.
We all are embodied in this lifetime, and it’s how our souls have chosen to experience the world. And the more embodied we are, the more we are as comfortable in our own skin as possible, the more we enjoy life, the more we can ground, the more we can transcend whatever’s going on for us.
7) Because we’re paying attention to those early signs, we’re adapting, we’re able not only to feel OK, but to feel joy. And to recognise that joy is a wonderful GPS, joy is a way, contentment is a way, love is a way, all the positive emotions, they’re ways of guiding us towards our highest goods. Finding safe ways to feel embodied and to build on them is just incredible. I never, ever, ever would have believed that I would be sitting here saying that, I used to be so disembodied.
8) Cats are incredible. And it’s Meadbh! I’m not going to lift her now, because she’s kind of purring away on my lap and holding paws with me, and I don’t want to disturb her. But I kind of, I learned over many, many years, to have more courage to be myself.
And my site, probably since I wrote the book, 365 Ways to Feel Better: Selfcare Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing, I put everything that I was doing at the time into the book. And it kind of was a way for me to out myself with some of my stranger offerings. And I think the more experienced I’ve got, and the more I’ve healed myself, the more I’ve realised it’s safe to be me, the more I’ve really kind of allowed what moves me to drive me.
And I have a whole area of work inspired by the rescue cats, working with polyvagal theory, presenting at a conference and recording CPD for a therapy organisation, and working on a book about it. But I’ve been, for 13 years since I got Rainbow, it’s been so informative. Like before I could get embodied as a human, before I could co-regulate with another human, it was Rainbow Magnificat helped me come to a place of peace and ease in my body on a regular basis, to help her stay in rest digest mode as much as possible, me talking as gently to her, and that became me talking gently to myself as well.
So obviously, I’m still a human. But yeah, cats being incredible had to be number eight.
9) Moving to Purr! Hiss! Freeze! and how I use cats to illustrate Polyvagal Theory (and encourage people to come up with their own names, when naming the dorsal vagal sympathetic survival and ventral vagal states) helping you get to know your own nervous system. You can listen to that episode again, or go to selfcarecoaching.net/feline. And that will take you there. But yeah, I just find it incredible how not just me, but my clients, people I know personally, and groups, we’re generally much kinder in the way we talk to a beloved cat or kitten or puppy or dog or lizard or toddler or baby or child. And the more you can think to yourself, the way you talk to yourself matters.
In terms of polyvagal theory, like your tone of voice is hugely important. And that was the start of it for me, really softening my tone of voice, because I didn’t want to upset the cat. And as a result, I began to internalise a softer inner voice, then all the tools and techniques and tips and tricks which do work, which are helpful, but they weren’t enough for me.
It’s simple, just play with it, experiment with it, be gentle with when you kind of go back into less friendly self-talk.
10) Healing can be painful. There were times when I was doing my crystal therapy training, there were times when I was doing my therapy training, oh my god, the amount of full-on snotty nose tears and sobbing and shaking and all of it.
Healing can be painful. You can have spiritual crises where I remember being told ground, ground, ground by my crystal therapy trainer. And later, when I became a trauma therapist and realising how important grounding and resourcing are.
11) But you don’t need any training to think how can ground, something like washing up can be grounding, putting your laundry away, walking barefoot in the grass or on the sand. Just putting the feet down, putting like the hands down, like touching the ground, imagining you’ve got roots going into the heart of the earth, breathing in that nourishing, supportive earth energy. Loads of kind of loads and loads and loads of ways, but I don’t want you to be thinking that it’s overly complicated.
Think of the times you felt most nourished and supported by the earth’s nourishing, supportive, accepting, holding, containing, beautiful healing energy. When have you felt most, you can just undo more of that. In terms of spiritual crises, I wish I had taken more time back then to rest.
I wish I had taken more time back then to process, to sleep, to dream, to nap, to meditate, to journal, to do the things that with hindsight would have helped me not feel like I spent the entire nearly four years of counselling training in an emotional washing machine. You can make it gentler for yourself. So that’s number 11.
Healing can be gentle. You get to choose and it really is about prioritising yourself.
12) If you choose gentle, if you choose ease for whatever’s coming up for healing for you in any given moment, maybe a lifetime of pain, maybe day to day, trust your nervous system. Stop overriding what you know to be true. You might be thinking you don’t understand, and again with trauma, with ADHD, we were conditioned to override.
We were conditioned to endure. We were conditioned to mask, to pretend to be okay when we weren’t. But you can unlearn that at any time and your nervous system is designed to help you thrive through what feels good.
It’s something that helps you then connect with others to create safety, not just for yourself, but for others. It contributes to peace in your relationships, in your communities, in the world at large, to your connecting with your resourcefulness. And oh my god, if we could live in a world where everyone was safe, welcome and loved, everyone would be in a position to thrive.
No problem would be insurmountable because we’d be working together in ways in which people felt safe enough to make mistakes and to really bring their best selves without pressure to be their best.
13) Is the everyday aspect of the Feel Better Every Day name and creating a life you don’t need to retreat from. Self-care is free. You don’t need fancy retreats. You can go for them. You can enjoy them. I’ve facilitated a few myself. It can be wonderful. But self-care is daily. It’s hourly. It’s every minute. You have a choice with every breath to move towards what feels good, what feels friendly and what doesn’t.
And I know that the self-care industry is a multi-million, multi-billion euro industry. But at its core, it’s about you connecting with yourself. You don’t need fancy candles. You don’t need anything.
I’ve got loads of free resources on the site. The book is very reasonable. There are libraries.
There’s the podcast. But there is loads of free information out there, not just from me, free meditations, free yoga nidras, all sorts of things.
But the more you learn to connect with yourself, the more you know in any given moment, what is your life force telling you? What is your nervous system telling you? And listen to it all.
14) Is the lesson and blessing that I’ve created a life I don’t need to retreat from. I’ve been in this house for six years. I’ve been in Ireland for six and a half years. And that was probably one of the most dramatic examples for me back in 2018, where I was so upset watching Boris Johnson on the TV, on the news, not facing any consequences from all the lies before the Brexit vote, which kind of led to so much hate and led to so much.
I mean, sunlight’s the best disinfectant, but it was just such an awful realisation for me, growing up Indian Irish, born in London, but believing that most people were against what the British Empire had inflicted on so much of the globe and realising, no, that hadn’t been the case. So, yeah, I’ve created a life I don’t need to retreat from, which is wonderful.
15) It came from number 15, following my feelings and letting myself sob watching him on the telly on Valentine’s Day 2018. And I was single, and I’d been single for a really long time. I was used to using my NLP, my coaching, all the things to get myself into a resourceful state and to not wallow.
But that day, I just let myself sob and sob and sob and sob. And I expected that the idea to move to Ireland would vanish. And for several days, I thought I’d wake up and feel differently.
But the more I learnt, I’d always had an Irish passport, the more I learnt, the more I wanted to do it. But I had to feel that pain, that hurt, that rage. And by this time, I’d gone through my therapy training, I’d done all of that, but it was still such a revelation that from such pain, like I couldn’t breathe, I was so upset the idea that hate had been legitimised.
And then later that year, what happened in America, and what’s going on now, what’s going on in so many parts of the world, it’s horrific. And we can use our rage, we can use our pain, we can use our hurt to heal, to make yourself safe, and to then ground resource yourself and figure out what you can do to turn that pain into support for yourself, for others.
16) Going back in time, learning from all over the world, learning from all different ages. So much of my work is influenced by ancient Eastern philosophies, including yogic philosophy. I started my personal yoga practice as pain relief in 2001, 2002. Yeah, 2001, I think.
Yeah, and it was never something I thought I’d be offering professionally, because I didn’t see myself as a yoga instructor. But the trauma informed yoga that I trained in, was my introduction into the kind of embodied somatic work, because although I’d done a lot of body based training as part of my psychosynthesis training, I would have to leave the room when we had to do a lot of the somatic stuff. Everyone else seemed happy in their bodies. And I was just like, “I can’t, I’m sober!” I’d become sober in 2001.
And I realised everyone else was sober too, it was the middle of the day, and we were on a training course. But the yoga therapy, having poses that helped me understand like medicine, like this is pain relief, like I’d already experienced, like Cat Cow or Wheel (back when I could do Wheel, my shoulder isn’t well enough at the moment). Certain poses would alleviate really severe endometriosis pain, that hospital prescribed painkillers did nothing to touch, that surgery didn’t really do much to help with.
I came to yoga through a desperation to heal. As I then did the training, and as I did more reading, recognising also how much of psychosynthesis had been influenced by ancient Eastern philosophies, it was also a way of connecting with my mother’s side of the family, the Indian side, which had been doubly colonised, triply colonised, with Goa in India having been colonised by the Portuguese, and India by the British, and then they moved to Kenya, British colony, and my Irish side, obviously colonised by the British, she says looking white with her English accent. But the idea of honouring that side, that my mum’s side of the family had been cut off from, from like the 1600s, where they became Catholic, and for me so much, and the more I learn… If you haven’t come across Meggan Watterson, you really want to read her. With colonisation, with people being cut off from their bodies, people being cut off from that innate wisdom that people around the world knew and passed down, and then being told, so like there was a deliberate, it was, it was designed to reduce Christianity, for example, to just male.
I remember, as a small child, Catholic was the one thing that both my parents were. My name is Eve, so I took everything I was hearing or reading very personally, the whole banished children of Eve thing. I couldn’t understand how you could ever have an equal world where half of the world was excluded. And Meggan Watterson’s work as a feminist theologian is phenomenal in terms of tracking how the patriarchy was deified when, like for example, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Acts of Paul and Thecla were excluded, Philip’s Gospel and Thomas’s Gospel, all known as the Gnostic Gospels, as if they were something separate, but they were actually deliberately excluded.
I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent for number 16, learning from all over the world and time, we now have access to cutting-edge medicine and science, we have ancient, ancient, ancient wisdom and it’s about learning with respect and honouring where it comes from. And also recognising, I think when people talk about cultural appropriation, there is a lot of resistance to what to me is obvious.
Like of course, if you’ve got people who have been penalised for honouring their own heritage, why on earth would it be OK for someone from that culture’s oppressor to parade it like a fashion statement? It’s basic respect.
At the same time, people who were cut off from their own heritage long before and looking for meaning in others, just by going inward, just by connecting with your energy, your life force, your nervous system, it’s a way of helping you reconnect, not only with your body, not only with your energy, but with the earth, with the planet and with your ancestors.
And it’s something everyone, like you might not know them, you might that again, so much of the world was robbed of the knowledge of their ancestors through, anyway, I’m not going to go into a whole thing that’s going to make me cry.
But let yourself learn from all of the world. Let yourself learn from all of time so far and also know that you already know whatever you need, it’s within you and it’s about getting quiet.
17) I’ve talked a bit about number the somatic, the body, the paying attention, like any moment you can ask yourself how you’re feeling, what’s that most prominent feeling? If you’re in a conversation with someone and you’re feeling anything, the more you get to know it, the more you can calm your own breath, the more you can resource yourself by grounding yourself, the more likely you are to make better decisions and help that conversation be a more positive one.
But it’s also let yourself eat when you’re hungry, let yourself drink when you’re thirsty, let yourself sleep when you’re tired, let yourself nap when you’re tired, let yourself dance, let yourself move, let yourself lie in the sun, like safely, dive into the ocean, like do what feels good, that’s what our bodies are there for, like our bodies are part of the divine. It’s not about being wrong, it’s not about trying to ascend or transcend the body, the body is not sinful, like the whole Banished Children of Eve, the whole idea of babies being born with sin, it’s just insane to me.
18) The transpersonal, I’m so grateful to my mum who recommended psychosynthesis to me when I said that I wanted to train as a psychotherapist. I ended up not doing the psychotherapy training, I just did the nearly four years counselling training, but very early on, realising that I didn’t have to do it all myself, as I mentioned, I had a lot of baggage around Catholicism from early childhood, there was a lot that I craved, and there was a lot that just felt like I would burst into flames because I was a human, I knew at an early age I was not a saint and my body would rot. When I died it would not remain pure.
When I came into psychosynthesis, and it’s so influenced by Eastern philosophies, and the idea of working with our whole selves, all our parts, all our sub-personalities, and also the transpersonal, the bit beyond the person, and I’ll never forget this, one of the earliest guided meditations, we did a lot of experiential work, and I had an image of myself as broken beyond repair. I was so dramatic. Under loads of black bin bags of rubbish, and glass, and broken glass, and just in an alleyway, and I was there to heal, but it was like, OK, how am I going to heal?
And mentally, cognitively, I was trying to think, OK, if I do this… I started the psychosynthesis training, I knew I was going to need my own personal therapy, and it was like, I’m ready to delve, I’m ready to do the work, and the coaching had been amazing, the yoga practice, the EFT, the NLP, the crystals, they’d all been amazing in helping me, but my default was still so self-loathing.
I was ready to do that deeper delving fix, and it’s like the transpersonal approach, you don’t fix yourself. You’re already whole, you’re already – everyone has that wholeness within them.
It’s about getting out of our own way, and connecting with the divine, remembering that we are part of the divine. We’re all made of stardust. In that meditation, when I was trying to think cognitively, How am I going to get out of under all this rubbish, under all this trauma, how am I ever going to feel OK? How am I ever going to not be all stinky from the garbage, and hideous, and broken, and ruined? And all of that.
And in the meditation, I saw some angels lift effortlessly everything that was covering me, and I was no longer stinky, and smelly, and broken. I managed to draw it on a little post-it note, like terribly, I’m not a very good drawer, and I kept it with me for many, many, many years.
Because when we trust, when we surrender, when we allow that higher energy, that beyond us, what we could ever imagine doing for ourselves, when we think of any problem that we’re facing, any problem that the world is facing, when we begin to see it as how are our souls trying to evolve, what might be for my benefit here, and that can be a really painful thing.
But at the end of the day, we’re already going through a painful thing. By having that extra lens, like how is my soul trying to evolve here, it can be a really beneficial way of giving additional perspective, connecting you with that observer part of yourself, that highest, wisest, truest, most miraculous, joyful, brilliant part of yourself.
I’m really grateful for being introduced to that in a way that didn’t need to go through a male priest, or to deal with any of the other issues around power, and corruption, and abuse, and all of it, so moving to number 19, 20, and 21…
19) That’s the framework that I’ve developed over the years, and I recently named it, so I initially named it as Feel, Be, Do, and then I changed it to Feel. Love. Heal. so the feel is how I began my healing journey 21, not 21 years ago, it would have been 25 years ago, when I began the trainings, the feeling better, the things I was desperate, when I got sober in 2001, and it’s like, How am I gonna stay alive when I can’t numb with whiskey, how am I gonna kind of continue breathing? I told you I was dramatic, but how can I do this, so I was highly, highly motivated to find ways to feel better, so like I say, the yoga, like pain relief, and when I started going to yoga classes, I was sobbing Savasana, because I had so much unprocessed trauma, and I was so uncomfortable in my own body.
I didn’t know anything about ADHD back then, but looking back, that would not have helped in terms of the stillness, the quiet, that was when flashbacks would come up for me, that was, I had no idea, but I knew that yoga was a psycho-spiritual practice, and to trust that it was ultimately healing. It’s also why I feel so strongly about trauma-informed yoga, so that people can get the benefits in a much more gentle way, rather than feeling like they’re going mad.
So the Feel Better was the active self-care, the yoga, the swimming, the learning to meditate, all the things that I immersed myself in, that I trained in, that I kind of love doing still, but there was a kind of desperation, there was a real, like, it’s the regulatory, I need to feel better, I need to be OK.
20) Then we move to number 20, which is the Love element, which is that you do not need to do a thing. You are already lovable, you are already whole, you are already healed, you are already worthy. You are not too much, you are enough, and it’s about that love, that supportive energy, that self-acceptance, that just knowing, like, in psychosynthesis, you’ve got the will archetype, which would be very much the feel better, what you can do, how you can apply skillful will, good will, transpersonal will, strong will, with the love, following the love archetype, and it’s just that you do not need to do a thing.
You can. You can do whatever you want. But whatever changes you want to make, you’re more likely to be successful when you come at it from that Love energy, when you already accept yourself, it’s much, much easier to then change whatever it is, because you’re not in a constant stress response, and then needing comfort and those bad habits.
EFT always begins with the set up statement: Even though, whatever the issue is, I deeply and completely love and accept myself, or you can use something softer, like, I choose to see them support myself, or I’m OK.
The idea, by accepting the thing you’re tapping on, so accepting the thing you’re unhappy enough about to be tapping on, you’re making, they call it psychological reversal. You’re making it much easier to make that change. I realise, with the explaining the love part of the Feel… Love… Heal… framework, giving all of this, it’s kind of like, so it’s love as a way to regulate, as a way to feel better, and I’m using it really to motivate you just to let yourself be, follow your “window of tolerance.”
Don’t try and sit with what’s too uncomfortable, let yourself be, if you need to distract yourself, let yourself just accept yourself, just love yourself, have as much compassion for yourself as you possibly can, and again, the fact that I’m sitting here 21 years later, and I truly, with every fibre of my being, believe this, where before I try affirmations, I do all the things, but I couldn’t possibly imagine them working for me, I was too broken, I was too wrong, I was too everything, so yeah, just notice how it feels to even imagine sending love to that most hurt, most wounded, most, I talk about Smelly Cat part of yourself (if you want to look at that episode again) and watch it transform.
21) Is the Heal element of the Feel. Love. Heal. framework that I’ve developed. And that’s really about collective care. It’s about the co-regulation. We’re wired for safety, we’re wired for connection, by following our nervous systems and retraining them to move towards what feels safe, what feels welcoming, what feels loving, so even if you’ve been conditioned to feel comfortable, and like what’s normal for you is what’s dangerous, you can retrain it.
The heal element is that collective care, moving beyond self-care, and thinking how you’re healing, you might be creating intergenerational healing for your trauma, there’s intergenerational trauma, there’s intergenerational healing, there’s vicarious trauma, there’s vicarious healing. By thinking not just of yourself, but how, like you are worthy of healing just for yourself, like you deserve to feel better just for yourself, and for lots of people it can be really motivating to think of post-traumatic growth. To think of how you might use what you’ve learned to help your family, your community, your team at work, the world, anything you care about.
But collective care, knowing that we are stronger together, and I sound like a political slogan which I don’t mean to, but we are all connected. And that’s what Heal is about.
Thank you for listening. Enormous thank you to all my clients, and supervisees, and readers, and audiences, and groups, and members, past, present, and future. I include you all in my morning Metta every day, and that day’s clients specifically, and supervisees.
I can’t believe how lucky I feel to be here 21 years in. I would be utterly blessed to be doing this for another 21, or 30, or however long potentially into the future.
I just feel so, so lucky. So, so blessed. And that’s not to say that it’s easy. Being self-employed obviously has its challenges. But I’m really grateful.
Thank you for listening. This episode, like all episodes, has been produced by me, your host, Eve Menezes Cunningham.
Next week, we’re honouring the Autumn Equinox by thinking about harvest, and also it’s the international, like peace one day, International Day of Peace, it’s International Yoga Day. The focus is going to be on “success amnesia”, really useful for trauma survivors, and ADHD brains.
Because we are so prone to forgetting the things that help us heal, that help us build confidence, that help us feel better about ourselves, I’m really looking forward to sharing that with you next week.
And you can access links, full transcripts, show notes, and more at thefeelbettereverydaypodcast.com
And you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, thanks again for listening, looking forward to sharing more, and in the Sole to Soul Circle tomorrow, we will be going more into how you can track your charge.
And how you can learn in terms of your own lessons and blessings in any situation, lots of love.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Celebrating 21 years in business
3:13 Lessons and blessings from 21 years in business
7:06 Trusting yourself and embodied well-being
13:16 Courage to be yourself and polyvagal theory
17:03 Gentle healing and trusting the nervous system
19:13 Creating a life you don’t need to retreat from
23:45 Learning from all over the world and somatic work
27:29 Learning from all over the world and time
31:42 Honouring the body as divine
34:55 The transpersonal and psychosynthesis
39:02 The Feel. Love. Heal. framework
44:08 Closing reflections and gratitude
DISCLAIMER
The content I share is not a replacement for one to one trauma therapy (etc). While you can do an enormous amount to support yourself, please always seek appropriate medical advice.
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